If I may I just thought of something amazing.
I know of no other company other that Microsoft that sends out Updates to around a billion computers every month.
It's hard for me to even think of the bandwidth and computer power to do such a thing.
A billion computers once a month with very little problems.
Can anybody think of another company that does such a thing to that many computers.
Never thought of it quite like that, but you have a very good point. Just another check mark to the "good" side of Microsoft.
That is pretty amazing,
I've been a member of Microsoft community for some time now,
Microsoft has I believe four data centers in the u.s. for archiving questions/ forum sections.....
It's usually very buggy but for shear amount of data I guess it's pretty good ?
I have always thought for all the hate Microsoft gets, they support quite a lot of machines and hardware. Considering that windows can be installed on almost anything is amazing, and most of the time drivers are ready to go, you have to respect the fact windows works very well on all types of hardware without crashing. I find that to be the most impressive thing.
You cannot say that about any other OS. Not linux either.
They're already working on reducing their load, as each month the updates brick a few machines
Ok, now seriously.
It's for sure a great thing for them, and the amount of bandwidth that would require is impressive. The CPU power required is actually minimal for that, only to power the webservers to deliver a few files, while the gross of the process is mostly disk I/O, some caching and tons of network transfers. In terms of home users is an inmense amount, but for big enterprises is not that uncommon.
A few samples:
- Antiviruses deliver signature updates daily or more, and engine updates somewhat more infrequently. And people tend to update their AVs far more frequently than the OS. Granted, there are a lot of different AVs so the load is spread among them.
- Oracle has also probably an enormous usage. It serves Java, which runs in millions of devices, computers, phones, developers also use it, and its updates may probably represent a significant bandwidth. It also serves Oracle DB server and MySQL, one of the most widely used DB servers in the world, specially in web servers
- Apache software foundation also host very large projects. As examples, it host the Apache httpd webserver that powers around 70% of internet servers, its frequent updates are fetched by millions of computers (mostly servers) very often. Granted, the downloads are distributed by each distribution repositories, but the main one may get significant traffic. They also host the OpenOffice.org package.
- Facebook is also one of the greatest examples of computing. It has millions of concurrent users almost every time and its load includes both substantial bandwidth and lots of DB access and CPU power. Does it count if it isn't about sending updates?
- We cannot forget about the king of internet, Google. Their search is by far the number 1 website in the world and for it to return its search result involves tons of calculations, lots of CPU distributed amont lots of servers. And it doesn't limit to the search engine. YouTube uses an even more impressive amount of bandwidth to deliver its videos to millions of users almost 24/7 (as well as subtantial uploads every minute)
- Big enterprises datacenters also host such high traffic services. Airlines, multinational companies databases for example, are several TB worth of data, and some GBs are generated every day, and even more is queried and analyzed.
- Governments also store gigantic databases about its population, services and the like. For sure they count as one of the biggest networks.
And surely I'm forgeting about a few more.
So yes, Microsoft is impressive, but far from unique. All in all, Windows updates downloads are quite stable and relatively fast, and official downloads from the website is quite good.
Not a os provider but valve corp does updates for the steam client quite often and keeps most of their games up to date. I would say they are software company that sends many updates globally all year long.
Yea I agree microsoft does a good job on keeping most their software up to date and must cost a lot though i'm sure they easliy make it back considering the amount of ppl with pcs with microsoft os/software and all the people who pay for xbox live on x360 and xbox one which would also add to the bandwidth cost to send updates to the consoles as well.
FTW= For The Win
A GuyIn gaming parlance, a choice or strategy that should guarantee victory. The phrase comes from the TV game show Hollywood Squares. Contestants choosing a square which would give them 3 in a row would frequently say something like "I'll take Paul Lynde for the win."
I noticed a good list of companies that issue updates often.
Updating things like Internet servers ect.
My amazement is not only Microsoft volume of a billion computers.
These update go to not only the highly train I.T. department of larger corporation or I.S.P. they go to everybody from a smuck like me to to grandma and my dumb neighbor on a verity of hardware with a verity of who know what for software on those computers. And it works.
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